Few men on the Missouri frontier in the nineteenth century exemplified the quality of character, integrity, as well as did Alexander William Doniphan. Whether in his capacity as a lawyer, soldier, legislator or friend, he remained steadfast to his beliefs and principles, though often in the minority.Several books have been written about Doniphan's military experiences during the Mexican War. But surprisingly this is the only part of his life which so far has been reported in great detail. The other aspects of his career have been treated only in a sketchy manner. It is therefore the purpose of this paper to present in greater detail those segments of Doniphan's career which have been neglected for the most part. While the author realizes his limited ability at the present time to do complete justice to the history of Alexander W. Doniphan, this paper will bring together and integrate for the first time the commonly known and the little known facts about his life. Personal letters, newspapers, journals, public documents and public addresses have been searched carefully in an effort to extract the facts and character traits which best portrayed the man.

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It seems clear to me that humanity currently stands at a major crossroad where “the old truths have lost their validity and new ones are yet to emerge”, to quote late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. It seems also clear that these “new truths” has to be formulated quickly if we do not want to end up on the wrong fork of the road... During recent years, these two insights has driven my desire to understand where we are now, how we ended up here and how we might move forward. Whereas I began in the field of architecture, my curiosity has led me to look into a wide array of subjects ranging from economy to thermodynamics and sociology in order to comprehend the bigger picture. In this thesis however, I have limited myself to the architectural realm again and I have done so through a close reading of a figure I found along the way: Christopher Wolfgang Alexander. During the course of the project, I have read his four-volume, magnum opus “The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe ” (2003-2004) where he summarizes over thirtyfive years of scientific and architectural research and practice into a “grand unified theory of architecture”. His views on many issues (social to scientific) align a lot with with mine so the goal of this project has been to let his theoretical framework guide my own creative process in order to be able to evaluate the result – does his work present some “new truths” to help us move forward or is it just another blind alley?

In this dissertation, I seek to analyze events in the 1821 Greek and Romanian revolutions against Ottoman rule in the Balkans using a relational sociology perspective. I am mainly looking at the network position of various figures who played a role in the development of nationalist arguments and ideology, and positing that these figures combined the role of network-broker – a figure who straddles holes among tight knit communities – and cultural brokers – a concept from anthropology involving the promotion of ideas from a “wider world” into a smaller community. I try to show how various configurations of network position and cultural knowledge can be an important determining factor in the success of various revolutionary actions, as well as the ideologies that develop from those actions. This factor which can provide an alternative explanation to that posed by modernization or institutional theories. In Chapter 1, I focus on Lycurgus Logothetis, a cultural and network broker who liberated Samos from the Ottoman Empire, while provoking the massacre of Chios; following the thread of events to France, I show how this event intertwined with events in the French art world, to increase support for Greece. In Chapter 2, I focus on the Phanariots, a group of elite Greek Christians in the Ottoman Empire who used their contracts with abroad to gain a precarious position within the Empire, one that involved the rapid rise and fall of a number of brokerage figures from a small pool of candidates. In Chapter 3, I show how the rebellion against that system, the rebellion of Tudor Vladimirescu, succeeded in creating a nationalist impulse in Romania owing to Vladimirescu’s creation of a quasi-group of mainly Romanian speaking notables, separated from the Greek world, and beholden to his success, and the limitation of this rebellion in the lack of important contacts from abroad. In Chapter 4, I examine the case of Ali Pasha, the rebellious, modernizing Pasha who developed an important base of operations by making local village contacts and reducing the Klepht-Armatoli, an Ottoman institution that depended on appointment the most important bandit in the region as an Imperial agent to keep the peace; and again, show that Ali Pasha’s bid for independence failed because of limited network connections with the Great Powers. Chapter 5 deals with Alexander Mavrocordatos, the network and cultural broker who succeeded in creating a new Greek constitution at the cost of importing old patron-client relations into his new and modernizing state. Finally in Chapter 6, I show the test case of a “trickster”, Georgios Karaiskakis, who handles contradictions between various networks of meaning with sarcasm and deliberate taboo violation, thus “getting action” without needing to use network or cultural brokerage. At the end of these chapters, I hope to have developed a number of interrelated hypotheses about the interaction between network brokerage, cultural brokerage, and the way these operate among the edges of paradox and contradiction in social life.

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Denna uppsats behandlar två barnporträtt utförda av Alexander Roslin utifrån ett performativt perspektiv. Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka en relativt outforskad aspekt av dennes konstnärskap samt hur detta relaterar till det samhälle konstnären verkade i. Hur upplysningens syn på barnet tar sitt uttryck i Alexander Roslins två barnporträtt samt hur detta kan analyseras utifrån ett performativt perspektiv är två centrala frågeställningar för uppsatsen. Frågeställningarna kommer att besvaras genom ett antal teoretiska utgångspunkter, där Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Émile, eller Om uppfostran är mest central. Metoden som uppsatsen kommer tillämpa är baserad på en komparativ analys av de två barnporträtten utifrån ett performativt perspektiv. Uppsatsens disposition är uppdelad i två kapitel, där det initiala beskriver och jämför de två porträtten, och det andra analyserar porträtten utifrån begreppet performativitet.  Uppsatsens generella resultat visar på en korrelation mellan det allmänna samhällets syn på barnet under 1700-talet och Alexander Roslins porträtteringar av barn. Detta understryks av uppsatsens performativa analys, som vidare bidrar till en djupare förståelse för hur samhället under 1700-talet och dess ideal tar sitt uttryck i en konstnärs skildringar.

Die Dissertation untersucht unternehmenspolitische Entscheidungen eines Chemie-Konzerns im 20. Jahrhunderts aus der Perspektive der Mikroebene. / The historical study analyzes the corporate policy of an electrochemical company on the micro level. She chooses one location of the "Dr. Alexander Wacker Gesellschaft" to show the effects of economic and political framework conditions on corporate decisions.

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